Everything in its Right Place

As an observational astronomer, I'm supposed to work under the mandate of describing the universe as it actually is (and not for example, how we might like it to be). For the most part though it's a strange kind of abstract reality that I work on, which usually seems completely divorced from everyday experience. When I observe, I point the telescope at an object, and use some sort of instrument to carefully collect light from a faint little part of the sky. Then I painstakingly massage the data to remove instrumental effects. The goal is to make it as accurate a representation as possible of the light that was released in the colossal thermonuclear explosion of a dying star in a distant galaxy; which then fell through space for several million years, slowly stretching as the universe expanded; and finally rained down on the Earth, bounced off a couple of mirrors and went splat on a small cryogenically-cooled chunk of silicon. It's all a very pretty picture, but since most of my supernovae are 10,000 times fainter than can be seen by the naked eye on a really dark night, I rarely find that the things I think about at work pop up in my "real" life.

Astronomers, as a general rule, never know what constellation their objects are in, or have much more than a rather vague notion of where they might be located in the sky. This is often surprising to members of the general public, and is probably a source of irritation to hard-core amateur astronomers who are chagrined to discover that the pros long ago sold their souls to 'Go-to" scopes. In fact, at many observatories you may not even ever see the telescope, and you certainly never observe in the same room with it. Generally you want to keep the telescope dome as dark and as close to the outside air temperature as possible. It amuses me to no end to see the Holywood version of astronomy, with some guy in his shirtsleeves sitting at a desk on the observatory floor with all the lights on while he's observing.

Real observing is a bit like playing a rather dull and tedious computer game all night long, preferably in some super-arid and somewhat airless environment. That's on a good night. On a bad night, observing is exactly like sitting around for hours waiting for the clouds to go away and wishing there was something better on TV at 3AM than infomercials, phone-sex ads, and reruns of The Rockford Files. Occasionally, you find an episode of The Simpsons on, which is usually the cue for that bane of all astronomers: The Sucker Hole. (This is when the clouds suddenly clear out and convince you to open the dome and start observing, only to sweep back in 15 seconds after you start taking data.)

But I digress...

Anyway, every once in a while I get surprised by some part of my job popping unexpectedly around a corner and saying boo. Occasionally, such events can even trigger a Zen moment where it becomes clear that the sort of things I picture in my head do, in fact, exist in nature, and that the world "really does work that way."

The picture here was taken at one of those "Gee, the Earth really is round" moments. The image is of the moon rising over the engineering building this afternoon as I looked out the window. (The moon is the small white dot over the building. My iSight doesn't have much of a 'zoom' capability.) I was a little surprised to find it there, as I had just been battling with it about 5 hours earlier. I had another remote observing session with IRTF in Hawaii this morning, and the moon was unfortunately just 5 degrees from my supernova, which made it wicked tricky to get a spectrum. So when it showed up again this afternoon during the daylight I was momentarily confused. (Partly, this confusion was due to my being a bit knackered. Remote observing still causes havoc with my circadian rhythms; I just get net-lagged instead of jet-lagged.)

Then it all clicked in my brain. The Sun was setting in London, and some 10-15,000 km 'below' me on the other side of the planet, it was rising in Hawaii. The object that I had observed this morning had spent the rest of the night slowly rotating under my bum (technically, it was my bum and the ground under it that was rotating, but anyway...) and was now rising out my window.

And so there it was, somewhere, rising up over Big Ben and East London: Supernova 2005hk. Somewhere, lost in all the light from the late-afternoon sky, a few photons from some distant dying star were also raining down into my eyeballs. Raining down sideways, from my point of view. And not just into my eyeballs; but all over the walls of my office and the side of Blackett Laboratory; pinging off the dome of the Albert Hall; splatting into trees and birds and dogs and babies in Hyde Park; and spraying itself all over the oblivious population of London.

Kinda cool.